Computers can now work out your sexuality just from a face picture
LONDON – NOVEMBER 02: A security camera hangs from a building on Novemebr 2, 2006 in London, England. Richard Thomas, the British government’s information commissioner has warned that the Britain is in danger of turning into a Big Brother society. The Surveillance Studies Network report has revealed that 20 per cent of the world’s spy cameras are in Britain. Up to 4.2 million CCTV cameras are in operation, about one for every 14 people. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
Advances in artificial intelligence mean machines are now able to figure out a person’s sexuality just from their face.
Research at Stanford University has found that human faces have subtle differences which can denote sexuality, IQ and even political views.
Experts Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang found that intimate traits in a face can be picked up by machine, which humans are not capable of spotting.
According to The Economist, a programme developed to figure out people’s sexuality from just their faces performed with remarkable accuracy.
The researchers’ used 130,741 images of 36,630 men and 170,360 images of 38,593 women downloaded from a popular American dating website.
The images – half of which were of gay people, half heterosexual – were put into a computer system, VGG-Face, which produced a string of numbers to represent a person’s faceprint.
The next step was to use a predictive model, known as logistic regression, to find correlations between the features of those faceprints and their owners’ sexuality.
The computer conclusions were then compared against the sexuality listed on the dating profile.
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Incredibly, the model accurately predicted the person’s sexuality in 81% of cases.
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